1. Field of the General Inventive Concept
The present general inventive concept relates to a print control apparatus and a PrintTicket control method. More particularly, the present general inventive concept relates to a print control apparatus capable of notifying a user that there are conflicting PrintTickets within an Extensible Markup Language (XML) paper specification (XPS) file and easily controlling the conflicting PrintTickets, and to a PrintTicket control method using the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Image forming apparatuses generally print print data generated by terminal devices, such as computers, onto recording media. Examples of such image forming apparatuses include copiers, printers, facsimile machines or multifunction peripherals (MFPs) which combine functions of copiers, printers and facsimile machines in a single system.
Image forming apparatuses which have been widely used in recent years support a direct printing function of printing document data, such as Portable Document Format (PDF) data, Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) data or Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) format data. Such a direct printing function enables direct printing by merely transmitting a file to an image forming apparatus without the need to launch an additional application program in a terminal device, such as a personal computer (PC), a personal digital assistant (PDA) or a digital camera.
Direct printing functions are applicable to an XML paper specification (XPS) file. XML is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. An XPS file has a fixed-layout electronic file format that preserves document formatting and can be shared, and is a zip-formatted file which includes all kinds of data and resources described by systematizing all resources required for documents or jobs in a directory structure and by writing the references therebetween in XML. Such an XPS file has a logical structure in the form of a tree having a plurality of levels, as illustrated in FIG. 1.
FIG. 1 illustrates a logical structure of an XPS file.
Referring to FIG. 1, information regarding print options set in an XPS file is defined in PrintTickets within the XPS file. A PrintTicket is an XML-based description of printer settings and configuration information that can be passed as an object to a print driver or stored as a part in an XPS document or file. PrintTickets describe how a document or document part is to printed. The XPS file illustrated in FIG. 1 is represented with a job level, a document level and a page level located in a hierarchical branching structure. The document level includes a plurality of document PrintTickets, and the page level includes a plurality of page PrintTickets. Different print options may be set for each of the plurality of document PrintTickets and for each of the plurality of page PrintTickets. For example, a job-level PrintTicket may be applied to all jobs to correspond to a job level, a document-level PrintTicket may be applied to a corresponding document level and a page level, which is lower than the document level, and a page-level PrintTicket may be applied to only a corresponding page level, which is lower than both the job-level and the document level.
As described above, in the XPS file, different print options may be applied for each PrintTicket, and thus a print option set to an upper-level PrintTicket may conflict with a print option set to a lower-level PrintTicket. However, conventionally when there is a conflict, the lower-level PrintTicket is automatically applied and a user obtains printed documents different from desired printed documents.
Additionally, even when the user determines that there are conflicting PrintTickets within the XPS file in a conventional art, he or she is not provided with information regarding the conflicting PrintTickets, and accordingly, he or she needs to check individually every print option of all PrintTickets and change conflicting print options, which causes inconvenience to users.